Out of memory

[werdigo49]

After I screwed up my 13.04 installation, I found a CD with 12.04 and installed it. Now I'm getting thrown out of applications and shown a black screen with a few lines of text like "Out of memory Kill processes (akonadi-nepomuk) score 133 or sacrifice child"

The machine is also running slow and jerkily (it took probably 10 seconds for the words "running" through "jerkily" to appear on the screen).

I managed to install a few programs (such as digikam) but the system often gives that "out of memory" error [man, it's really running slow now] and on restart I have to use "sudo dpkg --configure -a"

This is out of my league, guys. Any suggestions?

PS: It's giving me the "out of memory" reboot about every 8 minutes. Latest had (akonadi_maildis).

SOLVED: When installing 12.04 I had to alter the BIOS (it was looking for the OS on a USB drive), and must have changed something else. I just reset everything in the setup to default (except the boot location) and all seems well now.

NOT SO FAST... Different problem, still slow jerky mouse and reboot every few minutes. New topic, though; I haven't seen an "out of memory" error since reporting the above.

[tek_heretik]

After I screwed up my 13.04 installation, I found a CD with 12.04 and installed it. Now I'm getting thrown out of applications and shown a black screen with a few lines of text like "Out of memory Kill processes (akonadi-nepomuk) score 133 or sacrifice child"

The machine is also running slow and jerkily (it took probably 10 seconds for the words "running" through "jerkily" to appear on the screen).

I managed to install a few programs (such as digikam) but the system often gives that "out of memory" error [man, it's really running slow now] and on restart I have to use "sudo dpkg --configure -a"

This is out of my league, guys. Any suggestions?

PS: It's giving me the "out of memory" reboot about every 8 minutes. Latest had (akonadi_maildis).

SOLVED: When installing 12.04 I had to alter the BIOS (it was looking for the OS on a USB drive), and must have changed something else. I just reset everything in the setup to default (except the boot location) and all seems well now.

NOT SO FAST... Different problem, still slow jerky mouse and reboot every few minutes. New topic, though; I haven't seen an "out of memory" error since reporting the above.

You are really short on details. Processor (32-bit, 64-bit?), amount of RAM, etc, etc. If you don't know exactly what everything is and does in a BIOS, and then you let it set everything back to default, yeesh, you are asking for trouble. Is the mouse USB, PS2? You may need to re-enable 'legacy USB mouse support', just for example of course, I don't know your exact situation. Some BIOS will default the CPU back to 32-bit mode too (those settings can be tricky). I can't say much more without more information, too much guessing.

[werdigo49]

You are really short on details. Processor (32-bit, 64-bit?), amount of RAM, etc, etc. If you don't know exactly what everything is and does in a BIOS, and then you let it set everything back to default, yeesh, you are asking for trouble. Is the mouse USB, PS2? You may need to re-enable 'legacy USB mouse support', just for example of course, I don't know your exact situation. Some BIOS will default the CPU back to 32-bit mode too (those settings can be tricky). I can't say much more without more information, too much guessing.

[I was in the process of preparing a reply when the machine rebooted, with messages "Starting CUPS printer-server", "Checking battery state," and then an "Out of memory... Kill process 3226..."] Now, back to what I was writing...

PowerSpec N150, Celeron 32-bit processor, 4G of 133MHz RAM. I appreciate that experts need many details to offer informed help, but hoped that the fact that I had a well-functioning 13.04 setup until a few days ago might obviate the need for that. As for the BIOS reset, I bought this machine from Micro Computer Center late last year (Ubuntu was installed) and replaced its Ubuntu 11.04 with Kubuntu 12.04. Since I did nothing to the BIOS, I assumed that a reset to its defaults would return it to the state it was in when I purchased it. Guess that's not necessarily the case. No, I do not fully understand everything that BIOS does. I wonder how many (K)Ubuntu users do.

Mouse was a wireless USB; I'm now back to a wired USB with no discernible improvement.

Last night, following some AskUbuntu advice about reboots involving "anac(h)ronistic cron", I removed anacron but obviously [just booted me out again, another CUPS/Out-of-memory message; thank goodness for Auto-Save] that didn't solve the problems.

Mouse and keyboard seem to work fine immediately after the reboot, but get more and more jerky as the next unintended reboot nears.

What puzzles me is that I had a fine 12.04 system, upgraded online [oops, another reboot and Auto-Save restore] to 13.04 (no CD/DVD), until a few days ago when I unsuccessfully tried to install a later version of some software (details if needed). I reinstalled 12.04 using the same DVD from which I'd installed it originally, overwriting the 13.04 / partition and preserving /home. Well, maybe that's enough for now. Thanks for replying and thinking about [interrupted by another reboot; that's 3 while I've been preparing this response] my problem!

[tek_heretik]

[I was in the process of preparing a reply when the machine rebooted, with messages "Starting CUPS printer-server", "Checking battery state," and then an "Out of memory... Kill process 3226..."] Now, back to what I was writing...

PowerSpec N150, Celeron 32-bit processor, 4G of 133MHz RAM. I appreciate that experts need many details to offer informed help, but hoped that the fact that I had a well-functioning 13.04 setup until a few days ago might obviate the need for that. As for the BIOS reset, I bought this machine from Micro Computer Center late last year (Ubuntu was installed) and replaced its Ubuntu 11.04 with Kubuntu 12.04. Since I did nothing to the BIOS, I assumed that a reset to its defaults would return it to the state it was in when I purchased it. Guess that's not necessarily the case. No, I do not fully understand everything that BIOS does. I wonder how many (K)Ubuntu users do.

Mouse was a wireless USB; I'm now back to a wired USB with no discernible improvement.

Last night, following some AskUbuntu advice about reboots involving "anac(h)ronistic cron", I removed anacron but obviously [just booted me out again, another CUPS/Out-of-memory message; thank goodness for Auto-Save] that didn't solve the problems.

Mouse and keyboard seem to work fine immediately after the reboot, but get more and more jerky as the next unintended reboot nears.

What puzzles me is that I had a fine 12.04 system, upgraded online [oops, another reboot and Auto-Save restore] to 13.04 (no CD/DVD), until a few days ago when I unsuccessfully tried to install a later version of some software (details if needed). I reinstalled 12.04 using the same DVD from which I'd installed it originally, overwriting the 13.04 / partition and preserving /home. Well, maybe that's enough for now. Thanks for replying and thinking about [interrupted by another reboot; that's 3 while I've been preparing this response] my problem!

Well that's a little more information and by the sounds of it, this isn't an OS related issue at all, it was working fine and out of the blue, started acting up. The only way to eliminate any doubt, is to install or run a live less demanding OS, if it runs fine, then I'm sorry, the hardware is just too old and slow for a full bore modern OS with all the bells and whistles (I have a Pentium 4 1.7GHz OC'ed to 2GHz and it can barely run anything LXDE or Xfce). This also could possibly be a dying power supply or clogged fans, systematically eliminate every doubt one by one, 9 times out of 10, unwanted reboots are caused by a dying power supply or thermal issues. Btw, the BIOS is just a bit of software embedded in a chip for when the machine starts, it knows what the hardware is and how to deal with it, OSes use this information after the machine goes through its BIOS routine to utilize the hardware properly (aka, drivers), otherwise, without the BIOS or drivers, the attached hardware is just another circuit board sucking electricity for nothing, lol. ;-)

Edit: I forgot to mention, if you have added a lot of peripherals or drives, etc since you bought the machine, that is putting an extra load on an already 'small' and aging power supply, something to think about.

Edit 2: You might want to run a memory test too, you could have a bad stick or two, just guessing again of course. Test each stick one by one unless you understand memory addresses and amounts and can pin point which slot the bad stick is in.

[werdigo49]

Thanks again, Tek. Maybe this will help us narrow it down.

I found a new, unused SATA disk, unplugged the K12.04 disk, plugged in the new one, and installed Debian Wheezy (7) on it. It's been running all afternoon, with no reboots or jerky mouse action. (It's hard to get used to that Gnome Desktop... at this stage, I don't like it but am not quite ready to replace it with KDE.)

A reasonable inference is that the problem was either with the old hard disk, or the software installation on it (including Kubuntu 12.04).

Maybe I'll buy a new SATA disk today, install Kubuntu on it, and see what happens.

EDIT: I picked up a couple of refurbished 250G SATA disks at Micro Center, and installed Kubuntu 13.04 on one of them. (I'm posting this using it.) Both it, and the Debian 7 that's on a different SATA disk, are running fine. My (empirical, not based on an understanding of the processes) conclusion: THE ORIGINAL HARD DISK WENT BAD.